


Volta

by MissEllaVation



Category: U2
Genre: M/M
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2016-12-22
Updated: 2016-12-22
Packaged: 2018-09-11 00:31:29
Rating: Mature
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 2,910
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/8945443
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/MissEllaVation/pseuds/MissEllaVation
Summary: Feeling sentimental, Edge sends Bono what could be a letter or an email, but is probably a telepathic message.





	

**Author's Note:**

> Hi. This is my first time doing standup (taps mic.) I mean, this is my first attempt at writing whatever kind of thing this is, though I’ve been mulling it over for months. I was inspired by the beautiful writing of [spacemonkey](http://archiveofourown.org/users/spacemonkey/pseuds/spacemonkey) and [fouroux](http://archiveofourown.org/users/fouroux/pseuds/fouroux), and was basically jumped into Tha Bedge Life by [likeamadonna](http://archiveofourown.org/users/likeamadonna/pseuds/likeamadonna), who actually let me draw a couple of things for her glorious, heartbreaking, life-affirming book-length fic, [Fetish](http://archiveofourown.org/works/7276297/chapters/16523002). I fear I might have stolen the idea of mapping freckles from her. If I did, it was unintentional. (Just have your lawyer call my lawyer, okay?) Thank you; you all give me so much LIFE.
> 
> That said, this story is a pack of lies, and if you actually watch the “musical journey” clip on Youtube, you will see that the foot-thing is nothing but a product of my own diseased imagination. Even though I’ve watched it frame by frame, like a conspiracy theorist studying the Zapruder film, I can’t quite make it do what I want. Also, I do not know jack about sonnets, villanelles, sestinas, or any kind of writing that has actual rules. Also two, if anyone is offended by Self-Deprecating Edge, please understand that I consider him a devastatingly beautiful sex-god and god-of-sex.
> 
> I do not own U2. Bono keeps reminding me that this is the case, every time he comes down to the cellar with my bread and water. (Someone call Amnesty International, please!)

_"A successful poem starts in one position and ends at a very different one, often a contradictory or opposite one; yet there has been no break in the unity of the poem."_ — Randall Jarrell

 

The group interview: such an artificial set up. Awkward, every time. Even when we _wanted_ to do it. The four of us plunked down in a row, or in a huddle, or arranged like shrubbery in a formal garden, taller ones at the back. But always the same pecking order. You, me, Adam, Larry. No one ever prepared decent questions for Adam or Larry, so I loved it when they just piped up—Adam offering his sibilant British insight, Larry throwing a dart in lockjaw-Dublinese. Totally flustering the interviewer. And the poor camera guy, half asleep, having to pivot around suddenly like a bear chased by bees.

Bright studio lights in our eyes. The torture chamber, the inquisition. Be articulate, but please, no words of more than three syllables. Don’t be too serious, but don’t try to be funny either. Don’t look tired, or hungover, or angry. Or sad. _Never_ look sad. They will only resent you. Who is ‘they?’ All of them. 

“This kid has the whole world eating from the palm of his hand, and he _still_ hasn’t found what he’s looking for?” 

God, how that little manufactured controversy pissed me off. You just laughed, but I was so angry for you. What did those people know about you? Nothing. Ever. They still don’t.

But you still try to explain yourself to them, and I still sit beside you and let you do it. You must know you’re casting pearls before swine, right? As ever.

*

Why am I even thinking about this old stuff? Well, it’s the Winter Solstice. The shortest day, the longest night. Christmas just ahead of us. A time to look back before we move forward. The turn of the year. You once told me that in a sonnet, the place where the idea or the argument turns is called the _volta_. It’s the hinge that the rest of the poem swings around, the place where things change. I’m studying this old picture of us tonight, because it contains what I think of as our own turn, our own _volta_.

*

None of us were comfortable, I remember, being sat in Version Two of our standard configuration (note the Adam-Larry reversal) on objects not normally considered furniture.

The three of you look all right. With a few minor tweaks, you could almost be taken for contemporary guys. There’s Adam, as comfortable in his skin as it was possible for any of us to be, feet up, wearing his standard bemused expression and his tiny specs, like a German poet in exile. I envy him his lovely small head. And here’s Larry. Pouty Larry, pretty Larry. Those arms. Larry the gay icon. (Ironic or what?) He looks combative, doesn’t he? But I think he was probably just cold. 

_You’re_ okay. You’re fine. I think you could get away with calling yourself a goth poetry student. You could say you’d bought those old rusty black clothes at a jumble sale. You’d be studying at Sarah Lawrence maybe, surrounded by girls. You’d love it; they’d love it. You’d be the prettiest one, but they’d love you in spite of that. Or because of it.

Anyway.

There’s me. (Hello!) I am all kinds of wrong, as the kids say. I can’t remember which stylist had the idea of turning me into Lonesome Cowboy Edge, can you? But those bandanas and hats weren’t fooling anyone. I mean, it was a memorable look—you saw me coming and you knew who I was right away. No mistaking me for Andy Taylor or Martin Gore! Actually, the girls from Bananarama wore jeans like mine, didn’t they? But I digress. I was Inchicore, a man from a small village. I was Railroad Dave The Hobo, the rag-and-bone man. 

I’m not at all sure what I was doing with my elbow. It looks like an arrow, pointed at you. My hand all balled up on my hip. I look like I’m about to punch someone’s granny. I guess I already felt as if our “musical journey” was getting away from us. Or maybe I was afraid something might get away from _me_. 

I’m looking at our feet. My left, your right.

But I’ll get back to that in a minute.

You had the worst seat in the house, of course. A little apart from the rest of us, facing a different direction. The Leader of the Pack. You weren’t even sitting properly. That speaker was the wrong height for you. You were sort of leaning your arse against it. You looked just like The Sun, in the iconic sense—that face you see hanging over the doors of Elizabethan pubs, or the Sun from the tarot deck. Your beautiful wide forehead, your eyebrows, your eyes, all laid out along a perfect horizontal. And your nose—in this picture, anyway—a perfect vertical. Your fierce/tender little mouth all bunched up underneath.

I miss you. I know we spoke only last week, but I can’t help being aware that right now, when we look through our windows, we’re not even seeing the same ocean.

*

I know you like to think I’m preternaturally calm—and I can only ever hear that word with your inflection, B., _caaam_ —but please know that I hold some deep and terrible grudges.

For example, I’ve never thrown away the Washington Post’s review of Rattle and Hum. (The film, not the album.) It’s in a scrapbook I bought just for this purpose. A scrapbook of poor reviews. I was into excoriating myself at one point, I guess. Back then, negative news about U2 was very rare. These days? Well, I’ve given up. There is not a scrapbook big enough. (And no, it is _not_ your fault. Stop.)

Anyway, the guy accused us of attempting to place ourselves “in the rock continuum.” I don’t even know what that means. Surely we were already in the rock continuum? Somewhere between a bar-band playing its first gig and the Rolling Stones charging $500 a seat? I think the word he was looking for was something more like “pantheon.”

Then there was this:

“What’s most fun to watch is how Bono styles himself as a teen dream.”

Oh yes. You styled yourself as a teen dream. _You_ did that. You. Because as a band of neophytes not yet in the “continuum,” we were of course given no advice whatsoever about what might please the eye of a fan. (Or a friend.)

“Has there ever been an entertainment figure more in love with his upper arms than Bono?”

What a thing to complain about! Poor fella had to look at your arms for 99 minutes. Was he jealous? Was he trapped in the closet? I suppose I can forgive him on either count. You _were_ a teen dream. 

(You were a grownup dream too. You were a wet dream. 

You still are.) 

I’ve also saved the review from The New York Times:

“If anything, the camera might have lingered longer in close-up on the musicians as they play, since they are at their best when the camera's intensity matches their own […] Instead of acting out the songs that he performs, the singer Bono makes himself a supple, unself-conscious extension of the music itself, and the film captures this beautifully.”

_That_ review was written by a woman. (Surprise.) She was right, though. You were a supple unself-conscious whatever-whatever. You were liquid alabaster moving through space. I could hardly bear to look at you, but I had no choice.

*

“Play the blues, Edge!”

Oh sweetheart. We both know I should not play the blues. I cannot play the blues. Well I can of course, but the blues just aren’t me. Look at my long, pale face. I’m a Celt. We both are. We belong to the north wind and the salt-spray, peat-fires and haggis. Okay, not haggis. But there’s no shame in our Celtic-ness! It’s not as if the Celts are strangers to heartbreak or subjugation; we just respond to it on a different scale.

“Play the post-punk, Edge!” 

That would have made more sense. 

“Play that shit you always play, The Edge, those spectral colors that you own, those silvery notes that belong only to you!” 

(I love you.)

*

You have always been a kisser, a hugger. A grabber. (A biter.) When you see a person you genuinely like, you look as if you want to dip them in honey and eat them up.

(“But what does it mean when he looks at _me_ like that?”—Me, constantly, 1977-1988.)

And you never let anyone get away. You only add on. To lose your friendship, a person would have do something despicable, heinous. An atrocity. Beat a child, murder a dog. Punch a granny. You are one of precious few people on this planet who calls the human race their family and means it.

But I didn’t want to be your family. Not as such.

*

It began ages ago, with dreams. Nothing unusual about that. Any mental health professional will tell you that to dream about fucking a close friend is a very common experience. It means that you feel a special bond with that person. No more, no less. I mean, we worked so closely with each other. Creative partners. You’re a good collaborator. You love to work with all kinds of people. But I like to fancy myself that one special creative partner. (Amn’t I? Didn’t we share everything? Clothes, records, rooms, airplane seats, heartache? A toothbrush once or twice? Haven’t you been putting me in headlocks and taking bites out of me since the day we met? Didn’t you coax the songs out of my guitar just by sitting close to me while I played?)

I dreamed of beds. How prosaic. No rippling fields of gold, no oceans of violets for The Egg! I think this is because we spent so much time on the road, and bed quality was something all four of us could complain about in place of more potentially explosive topics. Example:

Adam: (casual) Crap beds.  
Larry: (death glare) Yep.

At first, I dreamed of crap motel beds with thin sheets and noisy springs. But by the time this picture was taken, the beds had become considerably more comfortable. 

Bed quality aside, in my dreams, there was never anything in my way; there were no barriers between us. I moved in you, deep and warm. We fit together like celestial machinery, you looking up at me with your beautiful half-smile. I wasn’t even sure, early on, that such a configuration of male bodies was possible. Could this be done, or would you need to be the other way around? But there you were. Smiling up at me. Like a gorgeous dark-haired girlfriend, a wife. Only better. (Don’t tell on me.) Each freckle on your face in its proper location, precisely where they are in waking life. (Because I have counted them for years, mapped them like stars.) The constellation under your left eye just asking to be kissed.

Then I would wake up alone. So much in love with you.

*

The day this photograph was taken, we were moving toward some kind of crisis. I believe you can see it in all of our faces and postures, not just mine. You looked like you had the weight of the world on your shoulders. A great responsibility. The band, Ali, maybe that child in Ethiopia you couldn’t take with you, or a village in Central America. To you, it was all one story, one song. Your God, always more present and insistent than mine, wanted something from you.

Your shoulders could bear this weight, of course. Even the one you messed up when you fell off the stage. (Always landing on your left, you poor thing.)

But the strain showed in your face, where your skin is surprisingly delicate, stretched thin over the bones. The lines alongside your nose and mouth were deep for someone so young, and you could sometimes look grim. Sexy as hell to the ladies (and certain others)—but easy for a stranger to misunderstand. Always a little furrow of concentration between your eyebrows as well. That day, all I wanted was to reach out, from my packing case to your speaker, to smooth my thumb over that furrow. Well. That wasn’t all I wanted. 

I wanted you. 

I couldn’t even say those words to myself, but I was tormented by images all day long. Day and night, night and day. Me: husband, father, right-hand man, mathematical guitar genius, with my sad face and my big black hat. 

I wanted you in the back of the bus and in the limousine. I wanted you in the breakfast buffets of a thousand hotels. Against the mirrored walls of every elevator, my mouth on your neck. I wanted you on the floral carpeting in the hallways, among the laundry carts and room service trays. I wanted to suck you off on MTV, right in front of Martha Quinn. I wanted to fuck you in front of Ronald Reagan and Margaret Thatcher. “Hey, look at us! What do you think of _this_?” Night after night, watching you prowl the stage, watching you sweat through your clothes, watching you peel them off: jacket, shirt, vest. Watching your skin gleam under the lights, your hair plastered to your face. I could actually feel that suspender chafing your nipple. I envied that suspender. Watching your lips brush the microphone, your fingers all over it. I wanted to push you to your knees, bury my hands in your hair, sob your name over and over again.

I wanted to bang my head against the wall till everything went black. You had to know, didn’t you? You, hanging on to the big spotlight, stalking me with it, circling me. No escape from you or the light. I was sure everyone—the audience, the crew, the whole wide world—could see just what I was thinking. You had to know. Of course you knew.

I watched you on stage. We always watch each other of course, we have no choice, it’s an occupational hazard. But the intensity then, the color, the pulsing of the blue lights and the red. I was almost surprised, when the film finally came out, that so much of it was in black and white. How did we not burn right through it?

*

What they don’t understand when they set up these group interviews is that sometimes, we don’t have anything much to say. Or we have too much to say, but it isn’t anything we can possibly share.

And yet, we were all counting on you to carry us through it, like always.

I think, that day, I just wanted to reassure you. To let you know I had your back, that I was willing to carry _you_ if necessary. So (genius that I am) I sort of tapped the back of your foot with the side of mine. And then I didn’t move. Just kept my foot there, my leg stretched out, awkward as hell, like that weird thing you sometimes see cats do. Call me crazy, but I think this _might_ have contributed to the overall tension of the photograph. 

Anyway.

I waited to see if you would move your foot away. You didn’t, but I still had to be sure. So I moved my foot forward again. I was nearly sliding off the packing case at this point; it was ridiculous. If you didn’t move away then, it was because you didn’t want to, but how could I believe that? My foot was wedged against the back of your heel. You surely felt its presence. The side of your leg was touching the front of mine, just barely, but enough to send a quick trail of sparks up and down the length of me. Just from this tiny point of contact, this foot nonsense, after everything else that I’d been thinking about!

You didn’t move your foot away.

Not even when Larry said “musical journey” for the twenty-seventh time, and we all doubled over laughing. Not even then did you move your foot. You bent from the waist, your left leg wobbled, you rubbed your hands together, you played with your harmonica. You looked up again and met my eye, you fussed with your hair and—best of all—you said my name. “Edge.” Very quickly, very quietly. No one else would have caught it. But it’s all there in the film. The camera is behind you; it catches you pushing your hair back over your shoulder. It catches my eyes lighting up for a split-second.

And you didn’t move your foot away. In fact, you pressed it back just a bit; you pressed your foot into mine. Once, then twice. That was it. The touch, the pressure. The _volta_ , the moment everything turned. Nothing had happened, almost nothing. Nothing had changed. Yet everything was different.

*

I wanted you. I’ve always wanted you. I wanted you even when I had you.

(And I want you right now. Wake up, sweetheart, half a world away. Wake up so I can say good night. Wake up so we can dream it all up again. 

I’ll see you soon.)


End file.
